Looking at the list: I bought The Master and Margarita for June, but didn't read it (due to both lack of time, and a difficulty getting into the book), I already owned both Bleak House and A Passage to India, but did not read those either, then I just gave up. *sigh* I really will have to try to do better next year.

I've download A Christmas Carol of the MR Book Club and Beasts and Super Beasts for this book club (should it win).

Last edited by Nyssa; 11-29-2011 at 12:53 AM.
Reason: Corrected Book Title

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The only thing I would like to see discussion on is some effort to pick works which are widely available as ebooks.

Sun surfer, perhaps we should have a discussion about this. I am not sure what the "some effort" would imply, if is not to pick books not available as an ebook. I know that this is a requirement for the other book club, maybe it would do to implement it here if not being available as an ebook is discouraging people from nominating books, voting for books in the polls, or reading the books and participating in the discussion?

I am not in favor of the idea because it creates a "doughnut hole" of books that are too recent to be in the public domain (and hence available from places like PG) yet not so recent and/or well known that the books have been released in ebook format. Going to only ebooks I suspect would have a related effect of making books not originally written in English even less available as one must also deal with the copyright on the translation. I see this especially applying to books written in non-Western European languages.

On the other hand if it is much of a barrier to participation to not be available in ebook that's worse.

I have 3 major concerns when it comes to either book club: Price, Availability & Time or Can I get it?; Can I afford to get it?; and How long will it take me to either afford it or get it, and then read it.
I will always make more effort to get any ebook than I will a paper book, because that option always saves me time, and more often than not, money, as well.

I have 3 major concerns when it comes to either book club: Price, Availability & Time or Can I get it?; Can I afford to get it?; and How long will it take me to either afford it or get it, and then read it.
I will always make more effort to get any ebook than I will a paper book, because that option always saves me time, and more often than not, money, as well.

As all of you may notice, the thread title has changed. This used to be the thread to keep track of categories and selections; now it's being expanded into the catch-all thread for our club. We'll use this thread as a welcome thread, an information thread and a general discussion thread all in one. It won't happen all at once, but during 2013, I hope to update the first post to include more relevant information and links.

If you're new to the club and have any questions or want to introduce yourself, you can post here (or just jump right into whichever other thread interests you). If anyone has questions, suggestions or anything else they'd like to discuss about the Literary Club or literature itself, post it here!

And to start things off with a little bang, I was thinking of a small change for 2013. Most changes, if any, would come during our yearly anniversary in the summer, but this is a small one that I think would be well to go ahead and start now.

Instead of aiming for five fully nominated works every month, we could instead simply aim for three full days of nominations.

It's not a big deal either way, but the reason being that we've had months where we don't reach five fully nominated works, which is fine, but it seems like because of this it'd be better if we didn't worry about trying to reach a specific number of nominees.

I have some questions for which I searched in the bookclub, but couldn't find:
- are there restrictions on choices for the literary bookclub, save for the genre?
- what genre is next month?
- to see whether a book has already been read: it is enough to search for the name of a book on the forum, or are the books listed somewhere?

As Billi said, next month's genre and previous selections are in the first post of this thread (and yep, we started not that long ago really, mid-2011). I can see how it could be easily missed at the present though because I'm in the (slow) process of updating and reformatting the post, so it's a bit messy right now. I should have it all sorted out by say mid-year at the latest.

About restrictions for the Lit Club, the main criteria is that it just be literary and fit the monthly category, and that's about it. For the most part it's left up to the nomination/voting process to weed out any nominations that might not fit well, but sometimes (rarely) I might step in if something definitely doesn't fit.